Meta

OpenSocial: Reality Sets In

A little over a month ago OpenSocial was hailed as “checkmate” and mesmerized the blogosphere. Now, the chorus of Kumbaya has been replaced by the cacophony of competition. As I argued earlier, OpenSocial was a game plan we’ve seen before, just not a particularly successful one. It transpires that:

The OpenSocial spec remains incomplete and has been described as “half-baked“.

Erstwhile supporters are scattering to offer their own widget platforms (LinkedIn, Friendster) and even choosing to clone Facebook’s platform instead (Bebo).

Some like LinkedIn are returning to the much more interesting problem of programmatically opening up the “social graph” as opposed to the distraction of just trying to create a least common denominator widget container.